This prize-winning image by Dutch astrophotographer Frans Kroon depicts the famous M42, or Great Nebula in Orion. Less dense than a terrestrial laboratory vacuum, it is the birthplace of many massive, hot young stars

Waiting for nightfall. This scanned slide traces the apparent movement of the sky over 45 minutes. The ghostly red trails are created by the head torches of guest astronomers as they prepare for a night’s astrophotography

A closer look at the Andromeda galaxy and its much smaller satellite galaxies, M32 and M110. Studies of a variable star within this ‘nebula’ enabled Edwin Hubble to demonstrate, in the 1920s, that it lay far beyond the Milky Way

The constellation of Andromeda is home to M31, the only galaxy beyond our own that most naked-eye observers can detect. At a little over 2 million light years, it shows here as a tiny, faintly elongated streak. In reality is a little more massive than our own Milky Way

Sunset at Les Granges. The ‘limb darkening effect’ seen here arises because the outer layers of the Sun are cooler, and so a deeper colour, than the underlying layers. Don’t harm your eyes by trying to detect this directly. Taken with a compact digital camera and filtered telescope